


how the world could be

by rappaccini



Series: ut malum pluvia [7]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Epilogue, F/M, Happy Ending, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:01:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26835616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: Seventeen years later, the second class of the Umbrella Academy is all grown up.(Or, an epilogue)
Relationships: some blink-and-you'll-miss-it Harold Jenkins/Lila Pitts
Series: ut malum pluvia [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857544
Comments: 26
Kudos: 63





	how the world could be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [everyone who read up until this point](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=everyone+who+read+up+until+this+point).



The house that swallowed a city block in the center of Midtown is crowded and rumbling with noise, but then, it always is, even setting aside the sheer size of the family living within it (forty-eight strong, forty-nine counting Mr. Pennycrumb, which most of the family does; they do not count the cats, who tend to come and go as they please, and really count more as guests than anything). The days when the Hargreeves mansion had been a deeply private and seclusive place, when invitations to it were highly coveted, and only afforded to the most corruptible of the city journalists, and the most contemptible politicians and businesspeople in the state, are long over.

Now, the doors are always open, and there is a constant stream of friends and friends-of-friends dropping in and out. Said friends and friends-of-friends are, of course, mostly those of the forty children living there; after all, despite Diego and Klaus’s penchant for bringing home strays of all sorts, even if it’s just for a bite to eat, Vanya is quite content to keep her distance from socializing, and Five and Allison are largely indifferent to it. And while Luther and Ben have their circles, they are still quite small and exclusive. 

And beyond that, _before_ that, the house had become a sort of meeting place for a dozen different throngs of people, who the siblings had mingled with, or else observed with owlish interest; there were so _many_ of them, and they were all so different-- in fact, on first glance, seem quite unlikely to cross paths ordinarily.

But then, the people they had come to the house to meet with were not ordinary in the slightest bit, were they? This, after all, was the family the likes of which the world had never seen. 

There were the standard trickle of ordinary people, from scattered spaces around the city, mostly brought in by Diego, who frequented the neighborhood the most of his siblings; he likes being out on the streets, seeing the people that lived there-- one lesson he’d taken to heart after he’d left home forever ago was the importance of knowing one’s community, which he took quite seriously. He’d carry in boxers from the gym he liked to fight at now and again, or mechanics he’d been looking to get a few pointers from, or the private eyes he’d befriended years back and liked to help out when it suited him. 

There were the university people: undergrads from the class Ben TAs at the city college, and the grad students he shares an office with, who are more often than not scattered throughout the house’s libraries, of which there are four. And, far less predictably, the astronomy professor Luther had run into a few years ago while on an errand for Ben, who has commandeered the family observatory for her own research, which he assists in.

There was the veritable rainbow of people Klaus brought in, utterly at random: a handful of old veterans, the occasional teenage runaway, the shiny string of artist friends he has over to tell him about the progress of whatever project of theirs he is funding, and the occasional theatre companies who pass through the city, more often now than before, who always seem to find themselves lounging over couches in the upstairs parlor, roaring with laughter with Klaus holding court in the center of them all.

There were the activists, who tended to cluster around the immense dining room when it was not in use. These people were here for Allison (and, less frequently, Luther, and less _publicly,_ Five), who is something of a linchpin in local politics at this point, reluctant to attend block parties and barbecues, but otherwise quite on top of organizing. They’d arrive like a tide after dinner once every week, staying late into the night pouring over bail funds and voter registration, editing pamphlets and discussing who to back for city council and state legislature campaigns. 

And most reliably, every Saturday at ten in the morning, there would be Clarissa, arriving with all the grace a troll-mutant woman can, with her son Oscar in tow. She would sit on the roof with Luther, chatting over tea and itty bitty sandwiches, while Oscar would mingle freely with whoever of the forty children were interested in seeing him. This most recent week, she had arrived with news that Oscar’s father will be performing at the Regent next month, and she’s warmed enough to him that she considers going with their son to see him. 

It had never been frightening, having this many people come and go; the Umbrella Academy are quite used to chaos, and their caretakers think it important, that they be raised with knowledge of the people outside the mansion’s walls, and that the people outside the mansion’s walls be raised with knowledge of _them._ They were schooled at home (a necessity of course, being that thirty-nine children with volatile powers might cause incredible unintended harm if not properly supervised), but never truly _isolated,_ as the doors to the world remained open, and inhabitants to both sides were allowed to come and go as they pleased. 

And besides, the house is large enough for one to always be able to find a place of one’s own within it, a hidden corner or unused room, or secluded alcove where one can sit and gather their thoughts, or read a book, or listen to their Walkman, or steal a kiss, or simply _be._

As an example, on the first of October, seventeen years from the children’s staggered arrival at the Hargreeves house, it is half past three on a brilliant blue afternoon, and the family’s annual birthday party is… well. It’s raging. It’s hard for a party not to rage, when there are forty young people ranging in age from seventeen to twenty all packed into a single parlor together, even if their guardians are among them, ensuring that whatever chaos unfolds doesn’t get too wild. Especially given that said guardians don’t exactly have a fantastic hold on _calm and collected_ either; but then, why should they? It’s a happy day.

And despite the way everyone’s packed together, shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow, somehow, a tiny alcove of space has opened in the mezzanine above the parlor, nearest to the wall. 

Their only company is the ancient, snoring form of Mr. Pennycrumb, now so old that he spends most of his days in a deep, unshakable slumber, so old that he can’t climb the stairs at all anymore, but simply plops down next to the elevator and waits for someone to let him on it. Leaning in that shadowed little corner, their feet brushing against the ancient dog’s droopy side, the first and last of the children Five had procured from the past have discovered a perfect place from which to observe the festivities, while ensuring that whatever it is they talk about will remain safely private. 

Lila and Harold are leaning over the balcony, pressing their forearms on the polished wood. They are near enough to reach out and touch the grand portrait of Uncle Pogo, peering warmly down from them at dominant spot on the wall. Enough time has passed since his death that none of the children he’d spent his twilight years rocking in his lap feel sad when they look at it; of course, it helps that in this case, the expression is wildly inaccurate to the actual face he would pull if he were to see such a festivity unfolding in the parlor. Uncle Pogo had not been strict, but he did like his peace and quiet, and what is happening below his watchful painted eye is decidedly not peaceful, nor quiet.

The Hargreeves family tends to note when things are beginning to get a little out of hand when Tai does his signature party trick, the one where he slams his gelatinous violet head into a desk, and comes away with a stapler in the middle of it, to a chorus of whoops. It seems that they’ve missed it though; the stapler is wobbling where a normal person’s eyes might have laid. It’s a shame that they didn’t see it; this trick is repeated every year, yet has somehow retained its hilarity.

So. The chaos is unfolding according to schedule. 

Of course, some of it had most certainly been the fault of the two co-conspirators, being that they spiked the punch. It’s the sort of prank they’re famous for; Harold and Lila are naturally cunning people, and they’ve taken that craftiness and applied it to building careers as the family’s greatest pranksters. Their success is to such an extent that the status they’ve attained among their mentors has ascended to the illustrious level of Worse Than Klaus And Five When We Were Eleven. Lila takes personal pride in that.

The pair rake their eyes over the crowd, which is comprised entirely of their family-- even _Grace,_ who’s taking a leave of absence from the hospital where she (being a robot who really only needs to be recharged and not a person who requires sleep and rest) basically lives now, to see them all.

Not that they’d turn anyone away who came wandering in; it’s just that no one has yet. (In fact, the last bright tribe of people to visit the mansion, a troupe of actors passing through, had left yesterday. This had disappointed Lila quite a bit. Of all the house’s many visitors, they are her favorites. In fact, she is seriously considering becoming one herself, being that she is quite good at changing her voice and gait and twisting her face around, and that she can also cry on command. Pretending to be other people for a living seems like it’s great fun, and maybe in a year or two, she’ll audition at the Regent and see what she can get).

Harold notes that the triplets are all huddled on the floor, sprawled out like cats in front of the low spitting fire, near the chair where Silje has drawn Jess into her lap _(so,_ he thinks sourly, _I guess I owe Abhi five bucks about that one, huh),_ and Kenta’s tugging Amihan’s thick, heavy glasses up to peer into her eyes, leaning in to nuzzle her forehead.

“You know how drunk Amihan is?” Lila asks, pointing with a bright violet-painted fingernail down at the pair.

“I mean, aside from you feeling it from the inside out?”

Lila rolls her eyes. "You're no fun today. Her bun’s undone.”

"Shit." It’s true. Amihan’s glossy dark hair is falling in a shiny waterfall down her shoulders, in a way he can’t recall having _ever_ seen it do so. “Think she’ll start flying in loop-de-loops?”

“I thought she had a rule about that. About not flying while drunk.”

“I guess we’ll see if she keeps to it,” he says. “It’s an interesting time, after all.”

Lila sighs. “Yes, it is.” 

They’ll discuss that, and all the weight it carries, in a moment; from the chairs in the center of it all, the first class are holding court. Allison has her legs folded neatly across Luther's lap, and is clanging her artificial hand against a tabletop to draw attention, and Ben grimaces at her, asking her to kindly just do it the easy way, which she rolls her eyes at. Five simply grimaces at the sound, younger and older than them all, curls a hand around Vanya's thigh, and whispers into her ear, something to the tune of "You don't suppose you could just blow the roof off this place, could you?"

To which, Vanya bats his shoulder, smiling and sweeping her gray-streaked hair behind her ears, giving him the sort of look that implies that they'll sneak off somewhere together later, somewhere quiet where they can lean on each other and sway to the hum of the music.

Once the crowd has settled enough, Klaus, standing on his toes on the delicate back of the antique sofa, with Diego's arm wrapped around his legs as leverage, begins reading off a proud roll call, throwing out names and ages into the air, which the children-who-are-nearly-not-children-anymore catch with cheers, raising up several dozen mismatched cups of ambiguously age-appropriate liquid in recognition of each other. 

Age is a little complicated with them, and a popular fighting topic (in no small part because it is a wonderfully fun thing to quarrel over, as it doesn’t really mean anything), being that they all arrived ranging anywhere from a few hours to a few days to a few months to a few years old, added onto the complication of the days on which they’d arrived and the fact that every single person in the room shares a single birthday… well, it’s difficult to tell, exactly, who’s older than who, barring the few cloudy age groups they’d sorted themselves into: those who’d arrived as infants (roughly half the class), those who’d been months-old babies, and the handful who’d been two or three.

In fact, they only definitively know that Lila is the oldest of them, having arrived first, and a few months shy of four years old, and that Harold is the youngest, having arrived last, and a few minutes shy of four hours old. Everyone else has to jockey for a place somewhere between them. 

For what it’s worth, Jennifer and Abhijat are locked in a ferocious rivalry for the throne of second-oldest, but the triplets are by far the most vicious about deciding their internal birth order, which seems to be different every day.

Anyway, everyone’s back together at last, and the last of them are of a sort of age of majority. They are close to being adults, every last one of them, and it all went by so _fast._

The family has a sort of tradition where, when one of the class turns seventeen, they are taken by their mentors to the place of their birth, where they explore the city, and are given the option to make contact with their birth families if they so choose to.

(As seventeen, of course, had been the age at which most of them had gone off on their own, they figure they should offer their charges the same sort of freedom at said age. And, seeing the youngest of the litter finally catch up to that fateful age... well. It's emotional in ways that none of them quite understand, that really makes them feel the new aches in their bones, and see the lines etched into their faces, and the gray tracing through their hair so much more _clearly._ It's a happy ache.)

Being that a solid half the class are so close in biological age, the frequency with which their guardians would be off with one of them had unfolded much in the way Harold thinks a dam might burst: first a trickle, then a torrent, and then, the last drifting ripples, sucked in by the surge.

He is at the very tail end of that surge, being the youngest of them. He is the only one of them to have not gone on his walkabout yet, but after what they’ve just told him, he’s sure it’ll be soon. If he even goes.

Well, he’s not the _only_ one.

Lila, the first of them all, had declined hers. She’s never told anyone why. 

He supposes it’s different for everyone. The triplets had flown off to Australia, but come back again the very next day, closed-lipped and grim about the experience, and they’d shut themselves up in their room for an entire week. Abhijat had come back from India and been simply… _whelmed_ by the experience (“Not overwhelmed?” Harold had prompted, “Not underwhelmed?” “No, just… whelmed.”), and meanwhile, Jennifer likes Fitchburg so much that she’s going to school there, and had only come home for the party.

Lila spots her, leaning on the balcony diagonal from them, bright orange sunglasses hanging low on her nose, fresh twists in her hair, courtesy of Allison's clever mechanical hand. She wonders if Jennifer ever unpacked her bag at all, or if she’ll leap off the plane with that stupid Randall’s Super Market cashier uniform already on.

For the life of her, she doesn’t get what she’d _seen_ in that little suburb that’d made her decide to fly across the Lakes and build a nest there. 

Or, well. She does. She kind of _can’t_ not get why. 

But Lila distinguishes knowing that Jennifer wants to be close to the scrap of family she’d found in her birthplace, and knowing that the cousin of her mom’s who’d liked her well enough to get her a cashiering job working the night shift will not compare to coming home to all of _this;_ surely, Jennifer will realize that. Surely, she will miss Lila as much as Lila has missed her, since she’d flown off for school. By virtue of being the oldest and among the oldest, they’d grown up especially close, and she doesn’t see why they had to lose that.

 _After all,_ Lila thinks confidently at her. _You will be bored of that cousin of yours, and that humdrum job, by the time you graduate. We will be fun and interesting forever._

It’s Jennifer, that had convinced Lila she had made the right choice in turning down her trip across the pond. She’s worried that if she goes, she’ll never come back, or she’ll come back so little that it’ll hardly matter at all. She’s worried that what she’s known for three years now will crawl up from the back of her mind and consume her.

There are six others, she knows, that must have been told something similar to her.

Lila finds them immediately, all in a tight cluster: Kenta and Silje and Amihan and Jess and Carla and Tai.

They’d never been this close-- well, Kenta and Amihan have been making moon eyes at each other, and she’s certain in the instinctual, supernatural way that she is certain about all things about her family, that some combination of Silje and Jess and Tai have hooked up (which really makes her wonder, seeing as Tai is a sentient blob of person-shaped jelly, how the fuck that _worked),_ but Carla had been utterly disconnected from them all. 

Until last month, when each of them had gone on their special trips, to Wakkanai, to Kirkenes, to Vigan, to Georgetown Mills and Arica and Auckland. They’d all gone alone with their mentors, as is standard, but _then._

Then, they’d all been ushered away, for a very private meeting, the sort of meeting Lila knows only from having experienced something similar herself.

They’d gone off on a strange, unannounced, uncelebrated trip to Norway, all thirteen of them, and upon returning, the six of Lila’s siblings had been inseparable. 

They’d also been a little cold towards her. She knows why.

In fact, Harold knows too now. He’d been told yesterday, and in being told, had been informally inducted into an imaginary club that Lila had devised inside her own mind, in which membership strictly depended upon one’s having lived a full-ish life in this timeline before. 

The thing is, all forty of them know that they’re children of time travel. The seven who’d preceded them had always been honest about it, to explain how on earth they’d obtained them, and how exactly Klaus had taken part in a war that had begun and ended before he was born, and to keep them from experiencing the whiplash that Allison had nearly twenty years prior, when she’d learned that having leapt from one point on a timeline to another had negated her ability to have children. 

And because _sometimes,_ they’d get these _dreams..._

So. They know.

But eight of them know a little more than everyone else. 

Eight of them have been here before, in a way that none of their other siblings have.

“We’re alike, you see,” Harold’s saying, unable to hide his relief. “And I’m glad. I think this’ll all be easier, with the both of us on the same page.” 

See, he and Lila have always been each other’s favorites. It’d started, quite simply, because of convenience: he’d been a toddler, and she’d been a young child full of power, keenly sensitive to the pressure of everyone else crowding the inside of her mind, and being that Harold is completely ordinary, he’d been something of a reprieve, from all the noise. And, he’d been a challenge. Unlike the rest of them, his thoughts and feelings are a complete mystery to her. She had to work to get close to him. She still has to.

They’d grown, from friends to partners-in-crime, making trouble, yes, but also resolving it. Lila, much like an old sailor might be able to sense a coming storm in her bones, has a head for the conflicts that erupt among their family right before they happen, and has always been quite prudent in breaking them up. And Harold, whose gift comes in the form of total ordinariness, is something of a perpetual neutral figure in the ever-shifting social hierarchy of the house, always a welcome presence (In a room full of people with powers, the single person without any at all is automatically the most special, after all). 

Suffice to say, they are very good at what they do. If their class is an organism, then they are the two halves of its beating heart. 

But now, at seventeen and almost-twenty-one, he gets the sense that they’re becoming something entirely different. They’d been stuck here, in this place of exciting but vaguely stressful ambiguity for years, ever since they were fourteen and seventeen, ever since Lila had gone off alone with the family for a long, serious talk.

When she’d returned, she’d done so withdrawn and grim, suddenly so secretive in a way that she’d never been before. And in turn, that had tipped the balance of the family into chaos; wild as she can be, she’s always the first to know how everyone’s feeling, the first to slide in and tug someone back into line. There isn’t really an age hierarchy, but she’s everyone’s big sister.

Now though… now Harold _gets_ it: “You’re like me. You’ve lived a life here before.”

Leonard Peabody. 

God, it’s so _hard_ to wrap his mind around. Were it not for the fact that Five doesn’t joke about time travel, not _ever,_ he’d take it for some kind of cruel prank.

“I killed my father,” he says. “The other me, I mean. He was a terrible man, and I killed him when I was a kid, and then I grew up in jail, and… well, I guess I just never got over it.”

Lila frowns, leaning in to bump her shoulder against his. The idea that a person’s life could just be _over,_ before it even begins, well… she knows how painful it is, to think about. It's almost terrifying, to think she's actually _been_ there.

“It’s even worse,” he says, “Because I hurt Vanya.” 

Lila almost laughs. It’s inconceivable, to imagine a world in which Harold, who had made no secret about favoring Vanya to the rest of their guardians, would want to harm her. It’s _inconceivable,_ to think of a world in which the Umbrella Academy hadn’t thought of ordinary children as equally special to their powerful counterparts. 

“We used to date, by the way,” Harold says bluntly.

“You what?”

“Vanya and me. The other me, I mean.”

“Oh. That’s…”

“Weird.”

“Yeah, weird.”

They avoid looking at each other for a minute. 

Lila feels a soft tickling against her bare legs. One of Klaus’s cats, one of the funny-looking ones that might be some designer breed or another, is weaving its way between them, and she reaches down to scratch at it. He reaches a narrow, vaguely alien-like face up and rubs his chin on the beaded bracelets rattling on her wrist, before sauntering on.

Harold is very studiously running his fingers along the grooves of one of the little drawings he’d etched into the railing. Vanya had been the one to nudge him in the direction of woodcarving, which had spread into an interest in models and sculpting (and, after a particularly horrendous accident that lead to Vanya's beloved violin breaking, instrument-craftsmanship) and… well. Now he realizes how she’d known he’d _like_ it so much.

“Why’d she do it?” he wonders. “Why’d she help me, if I was as terrible as they said? She said she asked for me specifically, when they were getting us all, so why...”

“I think,” Lila says, “That maybe she wanted to spare you that pain. If it makes sense.”

“It does. Is that… what happened with you?”

Lila nods. “A lot of really bad things happened to me.”

Things that, after hearing of them, had made her unable to look Five in the eye for a month. 

“And I… well, I hated them. I almost destroyed the world. I wanted to _kill_ them.”

She remembers reaching up, to trace the faded scar on Diego’s face, the puckered flesh where a knife had been dragged across it, and dipped into his eye socket so long ago. Anytime someone asks about it, he always has a different story. It’d been a _joke,_ until she learned why he didn’t want to tell anyone, because... “I did that,” she says, feeling her own eyes start to burn at the thought that she could do such a thing, that she did it to _him._

Fuck’s sake, Diego’s been one of her favorite people since before she can recall. He’d tolerated her during her embarrassingly bitey phase at five years old. He’d sewn her old wolf plushie back together after it had been beheaded in a particularly nasty fight she’d had with one of the neighborhood boys who thought it was stupid that she still carried it around everywhere at eight; after she’d punched his baby teeth out and broken her thumb in the process, Diego had taken her out for ice cream, and bandaged her hand while Five had shown her how to hold her fists properly when she jabs at someone’s teeth. 

“I did that to him.” 

She sighs, screwing her eyes shut. The warm golden light of the chandelier catches on her bright purple eyeshadow. 

“You know,” she says, _"sometimes,_ I get these _dreams…”_

All of them do. It’s part of the time-displacement in action, the kind of thing Five made sure they all had drilled into their minds, so when they’d inevitably wake up so turned around that they’re wondering if up was down and day was night, they’d have some idea as to why things had felt so viscerally _real._

The strange, shapeless nightmares had been a mainstay in their childhoods, but as the rest of Lila’s siblings had grown older, they’d seemed to outgrow them.

Not so with her. Hers had stayed, had only grown more vivid with time. She’ll wake up, and for a few minutes, she’ll find herself speaking in an accent that she simply does not have. She’ll feel strange spasms jerk her awake, like her muscles are burning from the inside out. She'll feel a strange stinging in her arms and along the tips of her fingers. She’ll find herself unable to even walk _past_ the infirmary; she’s always been so unsettled by it, but now, knowing what had _happened_ there...

“Me too,” Harold says, and at once Lila peers down at the six siblings who might be able to understand their predicament, wondering if they’d suffered the same. Well, maybe not Carla, but everyone else? She should talk to them later. They might be a little cliquish now, but they'll listen to her; _everyone_ listens to her.

“Vanya killed me, in mine,” Harold says. 

“Oh. _God.”_

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “I mean, it happens.” He casts a careful sidelong glance at her. “Do you think that maybe, they shouldn’t have told us?”

“No,” Lila replies. “Because so many things make _sense_ now, don’t they?”

He nods. 

All of the Hargreeves children had noticed things, even when they were tiny. The way Klaus jumps at loud noises. The way Vanya guards her violin. The way Luther and Five spend every Sunday afternoon taking careful inventory of the three years’ worth of nonperishables in one of the basement storerooms. The way Allison never sits with her back to an open door. The way Diego and Ben had _moved,_ that one night a burglar had broken into the house twelve years ago. The way all seven of them are prone to rolling bouts of insomnia, or of depression, or of short-temperedness that descends over them like a furious stormcloud.

And, of course, Allison’s arm and Diego’s eye, which are so obvious that they hardly count. 

Their caretakers are extraordinary, of course, and they cannot be expected to behave like normal people. But there’d been something _different_ about this, something sadder. 

Something had happened to them. That much is clear.

Each and every one of the children had privately come to realize that the Umbrella Academy had been something _else_ once. That the portraits on the wall _mean_ something, and once the children had been old enough to go off and play with the other kids in the neighborhood, who were prone to talking about all kinds of things, they’d return with pieces of the puzzle, of who their keepers had been, who the faceless man in all the portraits was. 

And, of course, that the seven odd adults who tucked them in at night and were mostly uncool (by virtue of being adults who tucked them at night), had once donned tight black jumpsuits, and saved the world. And that they never should've been put in the position to carry that weight in the first place. 

When they were eleven, their guardians had finally seen fit to show them, tearing down the thin layer of drywall obscuring the old elevator, and taking them all the way down, to pry open the tomb of their past and show them the comics, the action figures the magazine articles, the old portraits of a man whose face Lila had dreamed of so many times, without understanding why. 

It must be said that Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Five, Ben and Vanya had not withheld this secret with the intention of harming them, or even misleading them. It had been a choice made to ensure that they wouldn’t have too much to carry, before they were old enough to handle the weight. And the children had still been a little young for it, but the box had been opened, and all the troubles had gone flying out.

They’d hoped, of course, that no one would think of it. That they’d simply be able to forget. But you can’t exactly control how the past bubbles up. You only need to know that it _does,_ and to make your peace with it, which they did, and eventually, their children had forgiven them for keeping it buried so deeply, and from that forgiveness had blossomed understanding of their sibling-parents' eccentricities, and of the ways they might be able to become more accommodating of them. 

There had only been one other secret to keep, after that, and now, the very last of it has been brought out into the open air. 

And that secret had manifested itself too, Harold realizes, recalling the way that, as he grew up, Allison would start to just _snap_ at him, and then apologize for it immediately, her face white as a sheet. The way Vanya would get a little jumpier when he’d enter a room, then smooth it down and pretend it hadn’t happened. 

“In truth, I’m grateful,” he says. “Now I understand. And because I do, things are just falling into place. And maybe, I can help make things easier. I like knowing who I was, because it feels _necessary,_ you know?”

Lila hums in agreement. 

“And speaking of who you were,” she says, “When are you leaving?”

“For what?” Harold blinks. 

“For your big special trip. You know where you’re going, right?”

“Actually,” he admits. “I’m not. Going, that is. I was born here. In the city, in _this_ city. In fact, we could literally walk to the house that Five says I grew up in.”

“You’re kidding.” Lila whistles, “That must be nice.”

Leonard shrugs. It is, kind of; he wants to stay far away from the house where he’s told he’d been made miserable enough to murder. But being _from_ here, from this very city… He likes that. He’s a native to it, and it’s a part of him. But it’d still have been a part of him if he’d been from somewhere else. “Honestly? I feel a little robbed. I wanted to go somewhere cool. I mean, you could’ve gone to _London.”_

Lila laughs. 

And Harold frowns, recalling her refusal to go, all those years ago. “You don’t want to go either, right?”

Lila shakes her head, biting her lip. “I do, is the thing,” she says. “I always have. I _want_ to go to Brent. I _want_ to look around, and see where I’m from. Maybe see if there’s someone who remembers me.”

She isn’t even afraid, of seeing the flat that keeps appearing in her dreams, of looking at the floor and remembering what had happened there. She wants to see it, actually. She _wants_ to look at it, to finally get all the watery details in her dreams smoothed out. She wants to see it, so she can finally leave it behind her.

“Well then, why didn’t you _go?_ If you don’t mind my asking.”

Lila shrugs. She’d just… not felt any rush to do so. The first of the family birds had begun flying from the nest, and sure, she could’ve followed Jennifer’s path off to college, or Abhijat’s off to that apprenticeship thing in Tokyo, but… well.

“I _like_ it here. I like the house, and everyone in it. I fit here. And I didn’t want to miss out on anything. You know, what if someone misses me? What if I’m needed?” She frowns. “You know, maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe if I go, I’ll come back so different that you won’t be able to recognize me anymore. After all, there’s this whole other _me...”_

“We’d be alright without you for a minute, you know,” he says. “It’s _okay,_ to go off and figure things out. How long would you plan to be gone?”

“I have no idea,” she admits, “I hadn’t thought that far. But I know I want to do it without them.”

 _Them,_ of course, being their teacher-parent-sibling-mentor-who-knows-whats.

It’s not that she doesn’t trust them; quite the opposite. It’s that she thinks this is something she has to do without the presence of someone who’d known the her that once was. It’s that she doesn’t want that shadow hanging over her forever. She wants to go, to see what needs to be seen, to meet the ghosts and leave them behind. 

_And,_ she thinks, tilting her head towards her oldest friend. _Maybe it’d be a good idea, to have someone with me. Someone who doesn’t know who I was. Someone who_ gets _it._

“Would you come with me?” she asks. “If I were to go?”

“To London? England?”

“Yes, _dumbass.”_ She bats at his arm.

Harold blinks. “When would we even…”

“Whenever we want. It's not like either of us has any plans,” Lila grins. Then, riding the lightning-strike of a whim: “How about tomorrow?”

Harold grins at her. “Alright,” he agrees.

Someone’s struck up a song below, setting something by Tommy Lee and the Shondells up on the record player. It's an old song, one that everyone knows, in one form or another, and the excitement is spreading across the room like a living wave.

Below them, there's dancing, and Lila, having swallowed not even a single drop of alcohol, is buzzed simply from the jubilation of it all; oh, she does _love_ parties, she does _love_ when everyone's together, and oh, isn't love _nice?_ She can feel everyone’s happiness bubbling in her brain, and she snatches Harold by the wrist, racing them down the spiral staircase and wheeling them into the middle of the crowd, pulling him close enough that they’re breathing the same air.

They’ll go tomorrow, crossing the world without pomp or ceremony, and a few tomorrows after that, they'll come home with some answers, some they'd prepared for, some to questions they hadn't even thought to ask. They'll make that walk to the house that Harold has both lived and not lived in, and sort him out from his own shadow. Then, they'll talk to the six of their siblings who've discovered something similar about themselves, and finally, to the strange, world-weary people who are as much their parents as they are their siblings as they are something entirely different. They’ll all take a look at these people they once were, and in many ways, who they _still_ are, and they'll figure themselves out fearlessly, as they will be emboldened by the knowledge that they won't be doing this alone.

They have a whole lifetime to do it, in this golden world that their extraordinary family has given so much to make for them, a kinder world that will keep spinning on and on, where the doomsday clock's been abandoned to rust and gather dust, and where the skies are always blue.

But for now, it's enough to just be happy.

**Author's Note:**

> (On the other kids: You can probably guess who the Sparrows are. Jennifer and Abhijat are from the comics; Abhijat is the family's butler who wasn't adapted for the show, and Jennifer is a totally different character, seeing as we only have a few panels of her to go off of. I wanted to include them somehow, so I put them here. And the triplets came about because why not.)
> 
> (Also, there’s some subtextual Harold/Lila here. I did not expect to unironically love that ship as much as I do, but here we are. Harolila is a canoe, and I am its sole paddler.)
> 
> (The song referenced is 'I Think We're Alone Now' because I'm basic.)  
> ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
> 
> So, seven fics later, we’re here. Everything's come to an end.
> 
> First and foremost, once more, I love the first season of The Umbrella Academy. I will always love it, flaws and all, and it’s going to remain one of my favorite things for a long time to come. If you’ve read this series, you know my feelings about the second season. At the time of this fic's publication, TUA hasn't been renewed for a third, but if it does, I doubt I'll be watching it or any seasons following it, should they come along as well. Is there time for it to get better? Yes. Will it? Probably not. So as of this fic's completion, my bridges are burned. In my mind, TUA was a one-season miniseries, and nothing beyond 110 matters. 
> 
> My disappointment comes, more than anything, in sincerely loving this property and believing in it, and feeling like the potential of the show simply will not be reached under the creative team responsible for its creation and within the environment fostered by the studio managing the property. I think it could be something absolutely incredible, but in its current form it simply isn't there yet, and probably won't get there. I also believe that the ultimate incarnation of The Umbrella Academy that acts on all the potential the story possesses has yet to come. Maybe it'll be the comics when it's all said and done. Maybe it'll be a reboot of the show, sometime down the line. I'll be waiting.
> 
> This series is, more than anything else, a labor of love. I have a lot of emotions and opinions, and I wanted to spend ~350k words sorting through my feelings on the show itself (and, to some extent, the comics): what makes it so special, what I thought it did and didn't do well, what I want it to improve, where it might go and should have gone, and ultimately, the potential this story has and why I love it so much. It felt like therapy. After it all, I've come to my own conclusions and made my peace with them, and I'm hoping that, after having read this far, you may have as well. 
> 
> Essentially, this project served as my contingency plan in case the show took a turn that left too sour a taste in my mouth to contemplate continuing my engagement. It did. Real quickly, which, ouch. But hey, the saying goes ‘if you don’t like my story, write your own’ and… well. I did. Having completed this series, I feel emotionally insulated against whatever happens next; no matter what, I have this to look back upon. I figured that others who might’ve felt similarly disheartened might also take comfort in it, hence its publication. If you found yourself disappointed or underwhelmed, I hope that this series might've helped you weather that, or at least gave you a bit of entertainment. 
> 
> I realize I’ve written an insane amount, like, the equivalent of an ~800 page novel over a period of about two months (So if you’ve read the whole of this fic, you’ve read a doorstopper, which deserves commending!). This is probably the most productive I’ve ever been with my writing, and beyond that, I’ve never completed a work of this size and magnitude before. This is also the first time I've been so happy with something I've written. So all else aside, this was a great personal milestone for me.
> 
> Massive thanks to fiveyaaas, WolfSpider, insLicht, lifeofsnark and light_loves_the_dark for being incredibly supportive and responsive when I yelled the plot in our DMs and generally averaged one crisis of confidence about it a week, and for the members of the fiveya discord as a whole for being a fantastic and supportive community in general. Your support and interest is the backbone of why I was able to write and publish this, so credit where credit's due: without all of you, this series would not exist.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who hopped along this ride as I was posting- your comments as I was composing the fic were really valuable in being sure I was making all the points I wanted to hit come across, and aside from that, I loved hearing from you all. And to everyone who read this fic after its conclusion, hi, and thanks so much for lending me your time!
> 
> -rappaccini


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